possible LotR connections

Hazim ibn Gorion · Post by **Hazim ibn Gorion** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 12:06 pm

Okay, someone probably noticed this when BGI was released waaaaaay back when, but it's news to me. So forgive me if this is one of those "Duh!" posts.

Was reading Return of the King (you know...it's been a while) and got to the whole Paths of the Dead bit. Well, it is explained that the Paths of the Dead are entered through a door (aka--"gate") at the back of the vale, and that the last people who tried to go that way were a knight of Rohan and his son, Baldur...thus, Baldur's Gate. Does anyone know if this was a conscious reference in the game title or if it's just a concidence of fantasy names? I know TSR has had run-ins with Tolkien's benefactors in the past (the famous "hobbit/halfling" conspiracy), so it seems weird that the game developers might tempt fate again. However, it is a pretty obscure reference. A far cry from naming the city Frodo's Ring, or somesuch.

ThorinOakensfield · Post by **ThorinOakensfield** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 4:06 pm

His name was Baldur, but i guess TSR used the name when they made the Forgotten Realms. Although there are probably alot more names used by TSR that were made up be Tolkien.

Dúnadan · Post by **Dúnadan** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 5:09 pm

Care to elaborate on the...*Looks around nervously and whispers*...hobbit/halfling conspiracy?

Busta_Bradimus · Post by **Busta_Bradimus** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 6:05 pm

Actually the man that founded baldur's gate had the name of Balduran hence all the balduran equipment. Also The forgotten realms weren't created by TSR they were created by Ed Greenwood.

siber · Post by **siber** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 6:05 pm

um what about the little underdark quest in BG2, where the gnomes or dwarves have dug/mined too deep into the earth and unleashed a powerful demon, which in the game is called a balor i think?

balrog/moria/khazad dum anyone?

Busta_Bradimus · Post by **Busta_Bradimus** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 6:20 pm

Actually Balor is a common term used in a lot of fantasy stuff. Actually balor is taken from a lot of mythic folktales such as irish ones for example here is a little example the balor is my like golliath in david and golliath.

In Irish legend Balor was a famous warrior who had
one eye in the middle of his forehead.
Another, his baleful eye, was in the back of his skull.
With it he could strike people dead by looking at them,
but he kept it covered
except when he wanted to petrify his enemies.

Lugh, the divine here, was youthful, athletic and handsome.
When he saw Balor open his eye against him,
Lugh cast one of his father Aed's thunderbolts at him
with a slingshot, driving the thunderbolt through the back
of Balor's head and killing him (Mac Cana 1970).

In another version the cattle raider Cet put the brain of
Mes Gegra in his sling and hit the crown of Concubar's head.
Then Fingen, Concubar's physician,
stitched his head closed (Smith 1988).

[url="http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi21.htm"]here is where it came from[/url]

[ 04-12-2001: Message edited by: Busta_Bradimus ]

Nick_Dude · Post by **Nick_Dude** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 6:36 pm

the Silver Horn of Valhalla takes its name from a city of Danish gods. Valhalla is the name of their major city like the Olympus or something.

Busta_Bradimus · Post by **Busta_Bradimus** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 6:37 pm

Exactly dude most everything in fantasy books and games is based off of something taken from folklore or mythical beings from ancient stories so

Nick_Dude · Post by **Nick_Dude** » Thu Apr 12, 2001 10:35 pm

I was just thinking, couldn't the dudes that made the itmes and names of the things in Forgotten Realms be more orignal?
I mean, the monsters that are super tough in the Forgotten Realms (like the Tarrasque, which is only one is supposed to exist in the world) are wusses in games like Silver.(in that game he is one of the easiest "bosses" in the game)

Manveru · Post by **Manveru** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 12:47 am

Almost all fantasy worlds are offsprings of original Middlearth world so there are many similarities between them - it also includes names e.g. I saw Khazad as a name of dwarven kind in some fantsy world. So the name Baldur also could be taken from other sage - If it has new interesting history then it is nothing wrong in using the same or similar name - but in case when it is just plagiarism then it is not acceptable of course.

But I think that Forgotten Realms has its own full story so it could not be regarded as plagiarism from Tolkien's world.

Loredweller · Post by **Loredweller** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 3:36 am

@Hazim ibn Gorion
In fact then the claim should go another way. There was a book "Baldur's Gate" by
Eleanor Clark in 70'ies. The genre is the same, there even was one more book related, as far i know. Have never found one, nonetheless suspect it was the initial inspiration of the game. Can anybody tell something about this book? (Fable, couldn't you comment? You, i believe, might have wide knowledge in this field.)
TIA,
L.

siber · Post by **siber** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 6:58 am

I didn't say anything about the origin's of the name balor,i was just referring to the whole situation of that little quest in the underdark. It's basically a straight up copy of the balrog/moria situation in LOTR.

Loredweller · Post by **Loredweller** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 12:03 pm

Originally posted by Nick_Dude:
<STRONG>the Silver Horn of Valhalla takes its name from a city of Danish gods. Valhalla is the name of their major city like the Olympus or something. </STRONG>

BTW, such claim might be laid by any nation having germanic (or teutonic, i do not know exact term in English for this group) blood in them. As for Scandinavia, i always felt it more connected with Thor (or Tor?), the Tree of World and runes, leaving Nebelungs to German.

Though, there is the common ground, and being of neither scandinavian nor german roots i might be wrong, so may i be excused, if so

L.

ThorinOakensfield · Post by **ThorinOakensfield** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 3:31 pm

Also notice how all dwarven mines are invaded by monsters. In The Hobbit Smaug took over Lonely Mountain, a barlog(balor) took over mines in Moria and other refrences are made on dragons attacking dwarven mines. In the Icewind Dale Trioligy Bruenor's home was taken over by a shadow dragon. I know dragons like gold but why do they always go after dwarves? In the Hobbit and Streams of Silver, a group goes off to reclaim a dwarf's homeland, but during their adventure something really big happens that leads to another book. In the Hobbit Bilbo finds the ring, in Streams of Silver Regis is running from Artemis .

fable · Post by **fable** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 5:31 pm

Almost all fantasy worlds are offsprings of original Middlearth world so there are many similarities between them...

Not so. Tolkien had a very limited impact on fantasy fiction until TSR began grabbing up thirdrate writers to churn out AD&D stuff like fastfood. Great fantasy writers of the 1940's through 1970's like Vance, de Camp, Pratt, Leiber, Blish, Van Vogt, Zelazny, Delaney, Anderson (when he wasn't riding a rightwing hobbyhorse) and others owed much, much more to Dunsany, Howard, Merritt, and a host of other figures who are not well known today.

[ 04-13-2001: Message edited by: fable ]

Hazim ibn Gorion · Post by **Hazim ibn Gorion** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 5:45 pm

Originally posted by Dúnadan:
<STRONG>Care to elaborate on the...*Looks around nervously and whispers*...hobbit/halfling conspiracy?</STRONG>

When 1st edition AD&D rules first came out, halflings were called hobbits. Tolkien's estate sued. Name changed.

Bruce Lee · Post by **Bruce Lee** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 7:33 pm

Valhalla is what The Vikings considered paradise... Balder is/was the name of a Viking god. Maybe his name is Baldur in english...don't know about that.

fable · Post by **fable** » Fri Apr 13, 2001 7:45 pm

"Balor" and "Baldur" and other variants commonly refer to a solar god in several Celtic and Gothic pantheons. The name can be discovered among the gods of people whom the Romans conquered.

Nighthawk · Post by **Nighthawk** » Mon Apr 16, 2001 8:49 am

@fable: Tolkien had an amazingly strong influence on fantasy well before D&D became popular. Consider ANY fantasy novel where elves are something other than pixies and you can see his influence there. ANY novel with hobbit/half-ling like creatures as well. Many, many other less common influences as well. Of the names you list, only Zelazny and Delaney look familiar to me.

Picking up names and ideas from other works is something Tolkien did himself. His sources are much more obscure though. The Eldar Edda contains the names Gandalf and Gimli as well as several other of his dwarf names. In addition, it had the concept of a ring of invisibility that corrupted the owner.

fable · Post by **fable** » Mon Apr 16, 2001 10:11 am

@fable: Tolkien had an amazingly strong influence on fantasy well before D&D became popular. Consider ANY fantasy novel where elves are something other than pixies and you can see his influence there. ANY novel with hobbit/half-ling like creatures as well. Many, many other less common influences as well. Of the names you list, only Zelazny and Delaney look familiar to me.

With respect, Nighthawk, if you don't know the major names in fantasy (both best-selling, and best in quality) of the periods in question--and they were the best, every anthology will agree to this, and the literature they wrote will shout this to you--how can you make this judgement?

If you want to prove my statements wrong, please post a list of fantasy fiction published between 1940 and 1970 that shows the considerable influence of Tolkien, rather than his predecessors and many other authors.

I've read the stuff in question and I've known (in a very few cases) the authors. I simply mentioned the best-known of the group, but there were literally dozens of them, and virtually none of that fantasy-writing lot ever paid the slightest attention to Tolkien with the exception of two of his close acquaintances and friends: ERR Eddison, and CS Lewis. And Lewis' elves owe nothing to Tolkien, while Eddison never used elves.

You want a list of pre-TSR books whose elves owe nothing to Tolkien? Off the top of my pointy head, here's a very brief group of extremely popular and good works whose titles I could quickly recall. (There's much more, but I can't remember the short story titles as well as the novels.)

Dunsany's The Kith of the Elf Folk (better still, The King of Elfland's Daughter)

Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill

Philip K Di*k's The King of the Elves (gods, I can't believe that the system won't let me write this author's name)

Tieck's The Elves

Pratt & de Camp's Land of Unreason (elves drawn out of a brilliant realization of Oberon and Titania and their courts, from The Midsummer Night's Dream)

Most of the pre-1960's fantasy fiction of Jack Vance...or hell, the newer fantasy, as well. (The Green Pearl is an excellent example. His elves are decidedly alien in character and attitude, being air elementals.)

CS Lewis' Narnia series. (I don't like 'em, but many people do, and his elves again owe nothing to Tolkien.)

As to Halflings/Hobbits, they were an invention of Tolkien. But again, nobody used them, until the TSR Machine struck a deal with Tolkien's estate for the use of halfling creatures. As this happened in the 1980's, and Tolkien wrote more than a quarter of a century before this, again there was no pre-1975 Tolkien influence through these works, as I wrote.

Nighthawk, I don't mean to come off sounding irritated or belligerent. At the moment I'm not feeling too well (horrible, horrible allergies, had 'em all my life, but right now they're truly terrible), and I really wish people would read the good fantasy that existed before TSR, like Ford, turned it into an assembly line product. This isn't musty, tomes-in-the-library history; this is fact. The good stuff is out there, and people should read it to see for themselves. It's worth the effort.

[ 04-16-2001: Message edited by: fable ]